Hi folks,

First post here, and a new owner of the VholdR (non-HD) version. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the camera as it certainly beats my old clunky setup, but the video manipulation on a Mac was a bit painful.

I've searched the threads here, and the top sticky thread in this forum was helpful, and acted as the launchpad for this little project. I had trouble with the FfmpegX program (it's buggy), and I did not like having to transcode video just to edit it. The underlying tool of ffmpegx, ffmpeg, was out of date and newer versions can convert formats without transcoding.

I compiled the ffmpeg tool from most recent sources, and it converts the original Xvid AVI file into a .mov QuickTime very quickly. The video stream is verbatim copied, but tagged as "mp4v" which enables Apple's own MPEG4 decoder. The audio *is* converted into AAC, but that's quick. A 20MB AVI file is converted in about 5 seconds with no video quality loss.

Since this was just finished yesterday, it hasn't been tested much at all, but every clip I've converted is directly importable into iMovie '08 with no problem. I don't have '09 to test.

Benefits:
* latest ffmpeg version 0.5
* fast conversion
* no video quality loss
* audio is in standard AAC format
* directly importable into iMovie, iDVD, etc
* NO extra software is required (no DivX, no Xvid, no QuickTime Pro).
* simple command: vholdrmov save0.avi -o save0.mov

Limitations:
* command-line only tool at this point.
* not tested much

Note that ContourHD camera owners don't need this tool, this is only for original VholdR camcorders and Mac users. If you are in this group and are interested, would you mind downloading this archive and testing it out? If so, please work on a copy of your originals just in case there's a problem.

Get the ffmpeg, vholdrmov archive from my website: http://www.relro.net/ffmpeg-0....

Reply here with comments.

-Brent